I am in West Africa and everyone continually asks about the corruption.
At least here it's up front and honest. The guy with the AK-47 just wants $5.
In the USA, it's the guys in suits getting billions.
We don't have money for high speed rail? Sure we do, we spend $7 trillion per year on government - 37% of our economy goes to government. Pick your priorities.
Plus food turns out to be cheap because you get oil for a pretty affordable price. And that happens to be possible thanks to wars and associated expenditure.
Why are there tens of millions that can't afford higher education?
Why are people going bankrupt from health expenses?
The USA is just really bad at it. Therefore you need to spend more money just to come up to par with other developed countries. In that case, you need more tax revenue.
Tuition at the highly-rated community college near my house is $1,500 per semester. It's expensive to go away to a residential 4 year private university, but there are many other options out there.
The system is stupid. But it won't change. You won't see the public university in Memphis or Baltimore get more money federal money than a school like Stanford.
Those tax cuts should be added ON TOP of the income taxes those employees bring in.
More business should be more tax revenue = better services for the citizens.
>It's not corruption, it's business.
When a business is able to make a deal that gets them out of paying taxes they otherwise would legally be required to pay, that's corruption. Sugar coat it all you want, it's regular citizens they are stealing from.
"Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"
Read their RFP for more.
Businesses don't want to be victims of their own success, where immediately after they plunk the money down for buildout and development they're reassessed at the value they themselves added.
The choice is between those things because Amazon says so, and government chooses not to stand up to them by refusing to cooperate country-wide, or passing federal legislation.
Amazon is not an outlier here: this is how all deals of this size in the United States get done. It's a national embarrassment.
It doesn't have to be that way, and it isn't in many other countries.
Taxes are not a force of nature...
If you were to effectively prohibit all states from giving tax incentives to get companies to make their HQ there, you will fail in 2 important ways. The first one is that there will always be a way to bargain company-state-city wide. So even though the tax burden might be the same, the company could order for , for example,special infrastructure or whatever, to get extra value. And because the city wants to do it, its most likely going to. This result is worse than a tax break.
The other failure will come if you could, somehow, prohibit any thing like the one above from happening. That means that of 2 cities with similar demographics, where one of them has some sort of disadvantage, will be forever barred from having big companies set up shop. Why? Because if there is no tax incentive, the companies will only go to the best option available. If you happen to be that city, you would hit the jackpot. The rest, however...
You're completely wrong. Amazon WILL build HQ2. This is a zero sum game from citizens/cities perspective. No city in the US should offer such taxcut, and then, surprisingly, this money is spent by amazon on taxes and effectively given to the citizens in one of the cities.
If you allow this, you put in place scenario I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15193611
May be somewhere in India, where its cheaper for them to operate from.
Also given places like India want to attract investments, they will be more than happy to offer not only subsidies, but also provide free land and other perks like tax breaks and free electricity.
This might feel like blackmail. But that is what capitalism is all about. Companies do what is profitable for them.
Lol.
"When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."
--Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
So when amazon finds a way to lower its tax burden, either investors, employees or consumers, and most likely all of them,which are citizens, pay less taxes.
Taxes are not a means to reduce profits, if that were to be your desired result.
It's for sure simple mistake they specifically asks to calculate all this intangible things and reduce it to money amount they gets from citi.
So how about..... NO!
Quote from RFP: "Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"
And even if people do complain, all your mayor/city council has to do to win re-election is claim that all the jobs would disappear if they didn't offer the incentives. You can't do anything about this, it's just blatant corruption endemic to the system.